Far To Go (21 page)

When Marta woke, it was snowing. She could feel it without having to look; the air was different, muffled in the silence that only winter brings. She fought the urge to fall back into the thick blankets of sleep; instead she got up and put on her slippers and robe and opened the shutters of the little window in the hall.

It was still dark, the barest hint of light on the horizon. Like a premonition, like the last dream before waking.

She picked a bit of sleep from the corner of her eye and stood in front of the window looking down. Her ankles cold beneath her housecoat. The street below was empty; then there was a bicycle. Afterwards she would think back to this lone rider and imagine he’d worn a cape and carried a sword. The Angel of Death entering the city. But it was an officer’s peaked cap, a
Schirmmütze
, that he wore, and a
feldgrau
wool tunic with epaulettes and glinting buttons. He seemed to have appeared out of thin air, like a villain from a storybook. Marta closed her eyes to try to make the officer disappear, but when she opened them again he was still there, and behind him the whole street was full of soldiers, the Angel’s army streaming up the steep hill from the glimmering city below. The snow was falling heavily, making a fairy tale of Prague. The swirling white against miles of black and grey made it seem as if they had come from the world of an old photograph, a world from which all the colour had been drained. And there was something else that made her think they were part of a dream: they were driving on the wrong side of the road.

Marta turned her back to the window.
The Bauers could have got out
, she said to herself.
And you could have been with them.
She spoke to herself in the third person, as someone separate from her real self. Someone else would now have to cope with the crippling guilt—because there was no way she could manage it.

She went to wake the Bauers but saw there was already a light on in the parlour. It was five in the morning but they were already dressed, Anneliese in a knitted skirt and pearls, Pavel in a charcoal suit, his briefcase open on the table. Inside was a fat stack of American dollars held together by a rubber band. The first thing she heard when she came into the room was the Czech radio station: “German army infantry and aircraft are beginning the occupation of the territory of the republic at six o’clock. The slightest resistance will cause the most unforeseen consequences and lead to the intervention becoming utterly brutal. All commanders have to obey the orders of the occupying army. The various units of the Czech army are being disarmed . . . Prague will be occupied at six-thirty.”

She continued to listen: the message was being repeated.

Pavel turned to look at Marta, his face pink, as though the knot on his silk tie had been tied too tight.

“We had a phone call from the police chief.”

Marta pulled her robe around her body.

“The chief said that we are responsible for opening the factory as usual.”

“Can you believe it?” Anneliese asked.

“Then I got another call, from Hans. Offering to blow the factory up.”

“It’s the ides of March,” Anneliese said.

“Blow it up! Why?” Marta looked at Pavel.

“There has been an ordinance issued to install Czech trustees in Jewish businesses.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Bauer?”

“They’re taking our companies.”

Marta looked away. Ernst had been right. Pavel would lose what was his, one way or another. The unfairness of this washed over her. The indignity.

“Hácha’s daughter is married to a Jew,” Anneliese was saying. “He’s supposed to be a moderate.”

Pavel snorted. If he had not been so dignified, Marta thought, he would have spat.

“Did you hear about the conversation between Hitler and Chamberlain?” Marta asked. She wanted suddenly, desperately, to cheer the Bauers up; a joke was the only thing she could think of.

“Tell me.” Pavel leaned forward, eager to be entertained, distracted.

“Hitler and Chamberlain met in the street. And Hitler said, ‘Chamberlain, give me Czechoslovakia.’ And Chamberlain said, ‘Okay.’”

Marta paused for effect.

“The next day, Hitler ran into Chamberlain again. And he said, ‘Chamberlain, give me your umbrella.’ But Chamberlain said, ‘My umbrella?! Why, that belongs to me!’”

The Bauers laughed briefly, but Marta could see she hadn’t succeeded in lifting their moods. They turned back towards each other right away, faces solemn.

“Did you try to reach your mother?” Anneliese asked.

“I couldn’t,” Pavel said.

“It’s unbelievable. That Hácha signed that piece of paper.”

“If he didn’t sign we would have been bombed. Right now we would all be a big pile of smoking ashes.”

By the time Pepik woke, Messerschmitts were swooping low over the Vltava River, their shadows skimming across the choppy water. They rose steeply to clear the bridges, then plunged back down like hawks heading for the kill. Pepik, still in his blue flannel nightshirt, began to narrate the aircrafts’ movements. “Here it comes, ladies and gentlemen . . . an attack like the world has never known . . .” There was something blasé about his tone, though, as if he were a bored field correspondent, a newsman who had seen what the world had to offer and was no longer easily impressed.

Pavel left shortly after seven to go down to the factory. None of the workers had telephones, he said; someone would have to be sent house to house to tell them to report for work. He opened the door to leave; the wind blew in and lifted the edge of his scarf out sideways, like a child’s drawing of a snowman. “I’m late,” he said. He looked over at Marta then and held her eye for a moment before closing the door. She had a sudden, forcible feeling she would never see him again.

The following afternoon Marta returned from the greengrocer and saw two pairs of men’s leather shoes in the hall. Two well-tailored overcoats. There was something else too, a kind of hush in the flat. It was the silence of nothing at all being said, a silence that had come to signify over the past months that the opposite was true, that things of great consequence were being said, only behind locked doors.

She went into the parlour and found Pepik beneath the oak table, holding
Der Struwwelpeter
. “I’m busy,” he said.

She crouched down and kissed his forehead. “What time is it,
miláčku
?”

“Tick tock,” he said.

He wrinkled his brow and pretended to be reading, but he was, she saw, holding the book upside down. She kissed him again and turned it right side up. He made a little
humph
and turned it upside down again.

Stubborn, like his father. She heard Pavel come into the dining room behind them.

The light bulb of happiness flicked on inside her. She stood to move towards him, then saw the man behind Pavel. Ernst. She backed up quickly to behind the wall, out of view. Crouched down and leaned her cheek against the cool plaster. She could hear her heart in her ears. What was Ernst doing here? He had obviously not yet succeeded in getting hold of all of Pavel’s assets; Marta surmised that Ernst knew there was more money hidden away. He would need to work quickly now that Prague had been taken. He was doubling his efforts.

Ernst had already visited the Steins’ flat, of course, the day he came to ask Marta where the Bauers had gone. But from her hiding place she could see he was letting Pavel give him the tour, show him around as though he’d never seen the place before.

He stood at the mantel and looked at the photo of tiny Eva Stein.

He picked up the heavy silver menorah as though for the first time. There must have been something in its weight he found compelling.

Pavel sat down on a dining room chair, crossed one leg over the other, and got out his pipe and his pouch of tobacco. “Now that we’re done our business,” he said, “are you on your way to the town square to salute Blaskowitz’s honour guard?”

Ernst was reaching for his own pipe. Marta saw lines in his hair where the comb had been pulled through. She shifted on her haunches; her leg was falling asleep, but if she stood, she knew, they would hear her.

“I suppose all the German soldiers will be required to stop and salute,” Pavel said. “And Blaskowitz’s proclamation—that the Germans are here not as conquerors but to create ‘conditions for the peaceful collaboration of the two peoples’! How inane! Does he think we’re completely blind?”

Marta recalled the most recent sad radio broadcast by President Hácha. He had defined independence as a short period in Czechoslovakia’s national history that had come to an end.

Ernst tapped down his tobacco; the two men sucked their pipes in silence, their cheeks moving in and out like codfish.

“There will be lots of Germans at the ceremony tomorrow,” Ernst said mildly.

“Because of von Neurath?”

Baron Konstantin von Neurath, even Marta knew, would be appointed the new leader of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Ernst nodded. “They’re sending in special trains from the Sudetenland to greet him.”

“They’re worried the new
Reichsprotektor
won’t be welcomed by us Czechs?” Pavel’s voice was gleeful. “There must be fewer Nazis in our midst than we think.”

Quite the contrary, Marta thought as she crouched behind the wall. Ernst kept quiet too, and she understood this was his strategy: let his silence be taken as agreement and he would not have to lie outright.

“And what about you?” Pavel asked his friend again. “The powers that be at the factory have sent you up with the schoolchildren to greet the former foreign minister?” He was trying to keep his voice light but he clearly wanted to know what, exactly, Ernst was doing in Prague.

Ernst had a leg crossed over his knee and was bobbing it slightly, like an old lady. “That’s right. I’m here to welcome the
Reichsprotektor
.”

It was obvious that Pavel wasn’t satisfied, but he could not press the matter any further. Ernst must have sensed his friend’s uncertainty though, because he said quickly, “Herrick needed someone to do damage control with our supplier in London, and it’s easier from Prague. At least, that’s what I told him.”

He winked at Pavel—Marta couldn’t see it but she felt the gesture inhabiting the moment of silence. “I wonder what Masaryk would think if he could see Hácha,” Ernst continued.

“They say he fainted and had to be revived by Hitler’s doctor. And I heard he was forced to enter Prague Castle by the servant’s entrance.”

Ernst turned his head sharply. “Hitler? The servant’s entrance?”

“Not Hitler!” Pavel said. “Hácha.”

Marta’s leg was almost completely numb. She willed herself to forget it, to focus instead on the talk in the next room. But when she shifted on her haunches, she found she could not feel the limb at all. There was no choice but to stand; otherwise she would fall over. She rose as quietly as she could and hobbled forward briefly; it was as though her leg was made of wood. She went to skirt the edge of the room and go up the stairs behind the men’s backs, but she was too awkward and unsteady on her feet, too noisy, and they both turned to look at her as she entered.

Ernst stood. He and Marta were frozen, two feet apart, their eyes locked.

Pavel cleared his throat and said, slightly puzzled, “Ernst, you must remember Marta, Pepik’s governess?”

“Yes,” Ernst said. “Of course I do. Hello again, Marta.”

He reached over to kiss the back of her hand. It was a gesture appropriate only for a lady—and therefore there was something mocking in it—but Marta had no choice but to submit. Ernst’s lips were dry and cold.

Marta thought: Judas and Jesus. A kiss of betrayal.

Her leg was on fire as the blood rushed back through it.

She and Ernst looked at each other again in a contest of wills. All at once it came to her: she would confess. She would tell Pavel everything—that Ernst was against him, that he was the one who had thwarted their escape. If she implicated herself, so be it—she could not bear to keep the secret for a single second longer. But the grandfather clock ticked loudly in her ear and no sound came from her mouth. She willed herself to speak—it was just a matter of getting started, she knew—but the truth was, she did not have the courage. And Ernst had guessed as much. There was a smirk on his face, subtle but undeniable.

If Ernst was outed, Marta would go down with him. And Marta, they both knew, had more to lose.

The moment passed; Ernst said he really should be going. He had business to attend to, he said, and looked over at Marta and winked.

The two men clapped each other on the back and Pavel thanked Ernst for his offer.

“Do let me know,” Ernst said casually, “if you’d like further protection for your investment in the manner we discussed.”

Pavel cleared his throat, noncommittal. “Did you hear the one about Hitler’s conversation with Chamberlain?”

Ernst said yes, he’d already heard it.

“Marta told me that one,” Pavel said, pleased to be able to credit her. And Ernst said lightly, “Did she? I’m not surprised. She’s a clever girl, isn’t she. Your Marta.”

On April 5 Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the new
Reichsprotektor
of Bohemia and Moravia, arrived in Prague. The powers that be had arranged for sausage vendors and old-fashioned minstrels; from down on the street Marta could hear a big brass band pumping out “Das Lied der Deutschen” and the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the Nazi anthem. A national holiday had been proclaimed.

“Will we hang the swastika?” Marta asked Anneliese. All citizens had been ordered to do so, but Anneliese looked at her as though she were crazy. “Are you joking?” she asked. “We’ll pay the fine.”

When Marta leaned out the window into the bright spring morning she saw that the bulk of Czech householders obviously felt the same. Despite the supposed celebration, she could count only five flags along Vinohradská Street. The Nazi Party newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
, had reported that all schools and associations would be sending delegations to greet the German diplomat, but the crowd looked thin along the sidewalks, and only a few people followed the brigade as it proceeded down to Václavské náměstí for the military parade. Marta saw a group of adolescent boys with Nazi armbands running alongside the procession, their mouths wide open, screaming their enthusiasm into the roar of the wind. But on the opposite side of the street a woman in a red kerchief couldn’t help but cry, tears streaming down her fat cheeks as she gave the Nazi salute.